I have a desktop widget that acts as a sideshows photo frame on my development machine. Having something pleasant to stare at when my mind goes blank on a problem is nice.
This morning, during a particularly intense “now how the hell is that supposed to work” spell the photo below came up.
Click on the photo to see a much bigger version of the original.
I like the photo but it was taken with my little point and shoot and has way too much depth of field. I really don’t need to be able to identify the make and model of the cars in the back ground. So I loaded it into Photoshop and spent half and hour or so making a quick and dirty improvement. A little selective selecting and copying. Then a couple of rounds with the blur filter and I got this.
Again click on the photo for a much larger version. Don’t look too closely though. The illusion of shallower depth of field works fine in the 400 X 300 pixel version above but you can see the seams between the layers and some other artifacts in the larger version. Still for half an hour of futzing around I ended up with a much nicer photo to use on a web page.
